Product Lead, Platform
About Astra
Astra is building mission-critical infrastructure for moving money at scale. Our platform processes billions in annual transaction volume with 99.9%+ uptime, powering real-time transfers, bank debits, card disbursements, and complex financial compliance systems. We provide APIs and automation tools that enable businesses to move money programmatically while maintaining strict regulatory requirements.
The Role
We're looking for a Staff-level Product Lead to own Astra's platform layer – the APIs, developer experience, control plane, and foundational infrastructure products that sit above the rails and make Astra the Payments Cloud rather than just a payments gateway. This is an IC role with principal-level scope: you'll shape the architecture of how customers interact with Astra, how they configure and extend the platform, and how Astra scales to serve increasingly sophisticated builders.
You'll work directly with the Leadership Team and partner deeply with engineering, solutions, and go-to-market. The right person thinks like a platform architect, writes like an API designer, and ships like someone who has felt the consequences of a bad developer experience at 2am.
What You’ll Own
Astra's core API platform: authentication, versioning, pagination, rate limiting, error taxonomy, and the developer contracts that customers build on
The control plane product: configuration surfaces, rule engines, programmable routing logic, and the levers customers use to customize money movement behavior
Webhook and event architecture: delivery guarantees, retry logic, event schema design, and the observability customers need to build reliable integrations
Developer experience: documentation quality, SDK surface, sandbox fidelity, onboarding flows, and the time-to-first-transaction metric
Platform extensibility: how customers compose Astra's primitives – triggers, conditions, actions – to build complex payment workflows without custom engineering
Platform reliability and SLA products: how Astra communicates uptime, exposes status, and gives customers visibility into degradation
Long-term platform strategy: how Astra evolves from a multi-rail API into a programmable payments infrastructure layer, including agentic payment use cases
What You’ll Do Day-to-Day
Define and maintain Astra's API contract philosophy – versioning strategy, backwards compatibility standards, deprecation policies, and schema design principles
Write detailed platform specs that engineering can ship from: precise, edge-case-aware, and grounded in how real customers build
Own the platform roadmap – balancing foundational investments (auth, observability, extensibility) against customer-facing features and reliability work
Conduct technical discovery with Astra's most sophisticated customers to identify platform gaps and extensibility needs
Partner with engineering to review API design, maintain developer ergonomics standards, and hold the bar on platform quality
Work with solutions and implementation teams to understand where customers get stuck, break, or build workarounds – and translate that into platform requirements
Drive the developer experience roadmap in partnership with docs, solutions engineering, and DevRel functions as they mature
Represent platform strategy in customer conversations, partnership discussions, and technical due diligence processes
What We’re Looking For
Required Experience
6+ years of product management experience, with at least 3 years building developer-facing platform or API products at a technical infrastructure company
Deep expertise in API design – REST, webhooks, event-driven architecture – and strong opinions about what makes a platform great to build on
Experience owning a platform roadmap across authentication, configuration, extensibility, and observability layers
Strong understanding of how infrastructure companies create lock-in through developer experience, not just features
Comfort reasoning about systems-level tradeoffs: latency vs. consistency, configurability vs. complexity, generality vs. opinionation
Track record of operating as a principal-level IC – setting direction, influencing without authority, and driving outcomes across engineering and go-to-market
Exceptional written communication; you can produce a platform spec that is simultaneously a product document and a technical contract
Payments context is a plus, not a requirement – but intellectual curiosity about how money moves is required
Preferred Experience
Experience building platform products at a BaaS, payments infrastructure, or developer tools company
Familiarity with the control plane / data plane architecture pattern as applied to developer platforms
Background in workflow or rules-engine product design – if-this-then-that style programmability at the infrastructure layer
Exposure to agentic AI use cases and how AI-native systems impose new requirements on payment infrastructure (context, controls, micropayment patterns)
Why This Role Matters
You'll define the platform architecture of a company that has real ambitions to be category-defining infrastructure – the Snowflake of payments
You'll work directly with the founding team and the company's first Director of Product, with significant influence on product culture and engineering culture
Astra is profitable at Series B – the growth trajectory is funded, not a bet on future capital raises
The platform problems here are genuinely hard: multi-rail orchestration, programmable money movement, agentic payment primitives – this is not a CRUD application
What We Offer
Competitive compensation with equity in a growing fintech company.
Remote-first culture with flexible working arrangements
Small team, big impact — your work directly supports Astra’s ability to scale responsibly
Professional growth opportunities in compliance and risk management
Mission-driven — build infrastructure that powers financial innovation while meeting the highest regulatory standards
Remote Work and Culture
Astra is a remote-first company hiring only within the U.S. We value thoughtful collaboration, clarity, and initiative. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.